The present invention relates to a printing apparatus and an image processing method for the printing apparatus, and more specifically to a printing apparatus capable of processing images with a smaller memory at a high speed and with high resolution and to an image processing method for the printing apparatus.
In a printing apparatus such as a laser printer in which a stepping printing is difficult, a print image is drawn on a memory called frame buffer, and the image is transferred to a printer engine section according to movement of a polygon motor.
However, in the conventional type of image processing method for a printer, for instance, when printing an image on A3 size paper with the resolution of 400 dpi, a memory space of 8.5 MB is required on the frame buffer, and when printing with the resolution of 1200 dpi, a space memory of 34 MB is required on the frame buffer.
Further, as a frame buffer equivalent to 4 screens of a monochrome printing apparatus is required in a color printing apparatus, it is required to mount a large memory in the printing apparatus.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a printer capable of processing images with a small memory space and at a high speed with high resolution and an image processing method for the printer.
In the image processing method of the present invention, availability of an empty area in a swap memory used as a swap area of a page memory is checked, and when empty area is available, the image data is directly loaded in the swap memory and it is compressed, so that image processing can be executed with a small storage area at a high speed and with high resolution.
In the image processing method of the present invention, availability of an empty area in a swap memory used as a swap area of a page memory is checked, and when empty area is available, the image data is directly loaded in the swap memory and it is compressed, however, when empty area is not available, the image data is loaded in the page memory via a virtual storage area and then the image data is transferred to the swap memory for compression, so that image processing can be expressed with a small storage area at a high speed and with high resolution.
In the printing apparatus of the present invention, a determining unit is provided to determine the availability of an empty area in the swap memory, and a control unit is provided to directly load the image data in the swap memory and compressed the data when empty area is available, so that image processing can be executed with a small storage area at a high speed and with high resolution.
In the printing apparatus of the present invention, a determining unit is provided to determine the availability of an empty area in the swap memory, and a control unit is provided to directly load the image data in the swap memory and compressed the data when empty area is available, and to load the image data in the page memory via a virtual storage area and transfer the image data to the swap memory for compression when an empty area is not available, so that image processing can be executed with a small storage area at a high speed and with high resolution.